Characteristics of Good Advertising

1. Advertising must be an extension of a good marketing communication strategy. If it differs from the other components of the strategy, then is not meeting the goals of the strategy and perhaps creating unintended results or messages. Therefore, when you create advertisements you should try to keep the message consistent with the message of the marcom strategy.

2. Advertising needs to be relevant to the consumer’s needs, wants, and values. Marketers often create advertising that is stated in a way that relates to the marketer’s needs, wants and values, instead of the consumers. It is essential to find what the consumer needs and then to direct your advertising messages to those needs.

3. It is getting harder and harder to get a consumer’s attention these days, therefore, you should design your advertisements in such a way that it cuts through all the other things that are trying to get the consumer’s attention as well. Consumer’s tend to block out advertisements, so you need to try and find a unique way of getting them to pay attention. There are many ways of doing this. You can use humor, sound, lack of sound and many more. I plan on doing some blog entries on getting consumer’s attention in the future, so check back for those.

4. Advertising should be truthful. If your advertisement says your car can go 0 to 60 in 1 second, then your product better be able to meet that promise. Being honest is not only ethical, it is also the intelligent way of doing business. No one likes being deceived, and if deception occurs, the consumer will have a negative view of the company. Your business will make it a lot further with positive attitudes towards your company then with negative ones.

5. Sometimes advertisement creators get so caught up in designing a creative, cool advertisement that they fail to effectively deliver a message that will facilitate the success of their marketing communications strategy. The final outcome of your advertising efforts should be to sell your products, not to have advertisements that look amazing and win all kinds of awards. The awards for your creativity won’t sell your innovations.